Troy Seidle is Vice President of Research & Toxicology for Humane Society International. He leads a global team of scientists and policy experts working to expand the use of human biology-based predictive tools in toxicology and bioscience research to reduce reliance on animal use while continuing to advance human health and safety. Seidle established and co-managed the European research coordination project “AXLR8”, which hosted a series of international workshops aimed at bridging the concepts of “alternative testing strategies” and “21st century toxicology/Tox21” across key innovation economies. Building on this experience Seidle recognized the opportunity to extend the pathway paradigm from toxicology to the wider field of bioscience research, giving rise to the Biomed21 initiative of the Humane Society International and Humane Society of the United States. Troy holds an honours health sciences degree from the University of Waterloo.

Marina Simian received a Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Mina J. Bissell at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA, studying the role of matrix metalloproteinases as regulators of mammary gland branching morphogenesis using 3D organoid cultures, and defended her thesis in 2002 at the University of Buenos Aires. She is currently a researcher and professor at Instituto de Nanosistemas at Universidade Nacional de San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Steven Rehen received an MS and PhD from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He completed postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Diego, California and at The Scripps Research Institute. His focus is in neuroscience, having published more than 70 papers in the last 5 years. He is currently a full professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, his also the head of research at the D’Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR), and Chair at the Regional Committee Member, Pew Latin American Program in the Biomedical Sciences.

Fabio Klamt received an MS from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul with the thesis “Imbalance of Antioxidant Defense in Mice lacking Cellular Prion Proteins” and later a PhD with the thesis “Vitamin A in Sertoli cells”. He completed postdoctoral research at the Division of Therapeutic Proteins at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, where he worked with oxidative stress and cellular mechanism of apoptosis. He is currently a professor and principal investigator in the Department of Biochemistry at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.

David Pamies received and MS and PhD from the Miguel Hernandez University, in Spain. The focus of his PhD thesis was elucidating the role of neuropathy target esterase in differentiation. He did a trainee period at the European Commission Joint Research Center, when he worked with new 3D models to assess developmental neurotoxicity . He completed postdoctoral research at the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, where he worked with a 3D Brain Microphysiological System.

Patricia Beltrão-Braga is a biologist with an MS in virology and PhD in molecular biology from the University of São Paulo (USP). She completed postdoctoral research in neuroscience at the University of California-San Diego and is currently a professor at the University of São Paulo where she teaches embryology, genetics and virology. Among her projects at the Laboratory of Stem Cells and Disease Modeling at the Biomedical Sciences Institute of USP, Beltrão-Braga is responsible for the “The Tooth Fairy Project” – a Brazilian initiative that uses stem cells from children’s milk teeth to study the mechanisms involved in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Giorgia Quadrato received a PhD in pharmaceutical biotechnology from the University Amedeo Avogadro in Italy. Giorgia Quadrato joined the Arlotta laboratory (Harvard University/Broad Institute for MIT and Harvard) as a postdoctoral research associate in the fall of 2014. She is interested in modeling human brain development and disorders using brain organoids derived from human pluripotent stem cells. She is currently investigating the molecular underpinnings that control human brain development, to identify novel strategies to reprogram aberrant changes in cellular identity and brain connectomics of individuals affected by neuropsychiatric disorders.

Gerson Chadi has been a full professor at the University of São Paulo School of Medicine in Brazil since 1998, where he is currently the head of the Translational Neurology Unit at the Department of Neurology. He also coordinates the First Systematic Translational Research Program on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
in Brazil.

Juliana Minardi Nascimento received a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from Universidade de Campinas. She completed postodoctoral research at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, where she worked with systems biology of cell communication. Currently, she works with neuroproteomics of neural cell communication and differentiation, aiming to unravel some of the complex features of Schizophrenia and other disorders, studying the proteomics of neural cell types and cerebral organoids as models.

Understanding Parkinson’s diseases using patient neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC)Joseph R Mazzulli, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, United States
Presentation or video are not available

Joseph R. Mazzulli received a PhD from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. He completed postdoctoral research at the Children’s Hospital of of Philadelphia, Philadelphia PA and Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA. He is currently assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, where he works on delineating the pathogenic pathways that result in amyloid formation in the brain and their downstream toxic effects. He uses human models of neurodegenerative disease generated from induced pluripotent stem cells derived from reprogrammed patient somatic cells, with focus on the aggregation mechanism and toxicity of a-synuclein, which make up Lewy body inclusions found in Parkinson’s disease brain.